Josh Campbell

I have nearly twenty-five years of business experience and success, primarily in business-to-business sales. I started out as an advertising sales rep and I believe this is still the best grounding in sales that anyone can get. I then moved into IT sales, working for both large, established organizations, and start-ups. I have sold large, multi-million pound solutions to companies such as Glaxo SmithKline, O2, General Motors and Vodafone.

After becoming a father, I underwent two major changes in outlook. Firstly, I began to look for opportunities to ‘give something back’ to the community. I became increasingly involved in helping young people from less affluent backgrounds into work. I believe that there is much more that needs to be done to prepare them to make the switch between the world of school and the world of work, and it should not fall entirely at the feet of schools to do that – business needs to take a more active role.

Secondly, I became increasingly aware that my work was affecting my physical and mental health. I often allowed the high-pressure environment in which I worked to become a high-stress environment. I realized that I needed to do something about it and embarked on self-study to help me better deal with the vicissitudes of life.

In 2013, these two paths converged when I decided to make a huge career switch from corporate-land to The Academy of Sales. Since 2014 I have owned it with Samantha.I have two beliefs that drive me on a daily basis. The first is that every young person has a talent, and it is the responsibility of our generation to help them understand what that is. The second is that there are many things in our life we cannot control; we can always control how we react to them but we need to learn how. Methods to ingrain helpful behaviour needs to be taught in the same way we teach the main subjects at school and technical skills at work.